


Bureau Beach Week

by curvish



Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: Altered Items (Control), Fontainebleau Hotel, Memo, The Oldest House (Control), VHS Fancam, beach, report
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:48:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29591670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curvish/pseuds/curvish
Summary: it would be a wild thing to work at the Bureau. there'd be so much creepy baked-in voyeurism? of a sort in the whole organization because of all the people losing control of themselves, persona shifts, memory alteration and replacement, weird "therapies" and experiments. All the usual terrible things that happen in some bureaucratic office but with none of the usual rules of reality. all this burrows into my brain and gets to my fears about mass surveillance, never knowing who knows what, etc. The beach week experiment observers would be the audience in a way to an ongoing, ever-repeating drama. I imagine them having a character board and charts of relationships and then there'd be the weather people and the perception people too and they'd all be bothered by each other's indifference to their own things. And then it'd be really really weird for observation staff to interact with any participants. And also, it irks me that so many staff were excited about participating despite knowing the surveillance inherent in the experiment. I guess we all do the same in a way for modern conveniences, and also we're a bit powerless against it all too.All this is to say that a big part of the horror of Control for me is the loss of control portrayed in so many ways (surveillance, possession, memory shit, altered states).
Kudos: 2





	Bureau Beach Week

To: All Office Managers  
From: Dr. Darling  
Date: May 21  
Subject: Recreational Use of AI1354-HI

For many years, we have enjoyed the winter Bureau festivities of “Beach Week” or “Island Week”. The star of the party has been AI1354-HI, the Hula Dancer Photo Stand In. It has represented a bright glimmer of achievement and and triumph in the understanding and control of an Altered Item for the wellbeing of all members of the Bureau. Full reports on the Item are available to Office Managers upon request, but the primary file is included here to motivate the discussion:

### Hula Dancer Photo Stand In (AI1354-HI)

####  **CONTAINMENT PROCEDURE**

The only known field effect mitigations are limited to a group of 4 persons that wear the poolside hotel staff uniforms recovered at the time of the Item’s original acquisition. All 4 uniforms must be worn and present for maximum effect and its maximum temporal duration, and their actions are limited to hoisting and relocating the Stand In by hand. Anyone without uniform is disinclined to move the Stand In in any way. The only known instance was observed at the 1977 experiment. One man was seen chastising his division’s head for attempting to push the Stand In, calling after him “Robert, honey. Don’t touch that. Come back to mother now,” whereupon the division head sulked back to the man and clung to his leg for the remainder of their time there.

####  **DESCRIPTION/ALTERED EFFECT**

A Photo Stand In, plywood. Painted to depict a hula dancer from native Hawaiian culture. Was built and installed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida during the Spring of 1955. The Stand In was featured prominently in culture magazines of that year, with countless celebrities posing there. Rumors spread at the time of the “mesmerizing, warm, and welcoming” poolside areas at the hotel. It drew large crowds even on cloudy and rainy days because “the sun always shines on the Fontainebleau Hotel pool,” reported one local newspaper.

A micro-climate surrounds the item, roughly spherical, radius 50-100 meters, only through open air. It has been confirmed to mirror typical past weather conditions in Miami Beach regardless of the item’s present location. Any persons within this micro-climate exhibits anachronistic language patterns and also a seeming (temporary) displacement of short and mid-term memory and identity with the events and culture of 1955 Eastern Seaboard America. Such persons assume names and personas. Upon leaving the field, subjects do not remember specific events from nor their behaviors during their time near the Item. They seem unable to directly recall any memories but, however, can expound at length when questioned appropriately, often to their own surprise.

The micro-climate induces this linguo-perceptive-cultural-temporal shift in **all** within it.

Over 207 recurring persona shifts have been observed. This suggests the Item is syncing participants with a consistent and stable echo of people and events of 1955, looping on the same moments in endless variety.

The Bureau “Beach Week” is a yearly experiment and holiday held in the third week of February. The “beach” in the name refers to the experiment facilities built within the early-summer Florida micro-climate created by the Altered Item. The festivities first began unofficially at an unspecified time within the first year of the item’s arrival at the Bureau in 1955.

After several years of limited volunteer observation and testing, in February 1961 volunteers were sought across the entire Bureau for “A Safe and Relaxing Altered Item Experience and Experiment.” The solicitation flyer depicts a large room of the Oldest House containing a hemisphere full of lounging sunbathers. The fine print on the flyer notes “Standard Bureau Workplace Safety Waivers apply. Additional liability waivers ‘Memory and Perception, Type C’ and ‘Identity and Continuity of Personhood, Class 2B’ also apply. Consult with your Bureau Health and Safety Officer about your personal risk profile.”

The 1961 first official experiment was a deemed a success, though two observation staff members were lost when a building shift occurred on the 3rd day. It subsided within two hours but the personnel were never recovered.

Two weeks later, experiment staff provided each participant with a commemorative certificate and portrait taken at the Altered Item Stand-In taken by an field-external camera. Despite the standard Bureau NDA’s and the extensive experiment accommodations and containment, word of the experiment experience quickly spread (at least as rumor) due to participants spending inordinate amounts of time staring at the photo, as well as their “excellent” sun tans despite never having left the city. When flyers for the 1962 follow-on experiment went up, over 1/3 of Bureau staff requested participation within the day compared to the fifteen applicants for the first experiment.

During the winters of 1981-1987, the “Island Week” festivities (as they were know between 1977-1990) were extended to 5 weeks, and lodgings, a pool, and a small sand beach were constructed surrounding the Item. These observation periods revealed 90% of the recurring personas.

The largest observed field radius was recorded during the 1989 “Beach Week: Winter Blues” experiment. The item had been relocated to a recently discovered space with usable floor space of dimensions of roughly 1000 by 850 meters. (The standard beach week facility known to most staff is of dimensions 250 by 150 meters). All participants were styled by a staff of 100 stylists and hairdressers (who were told they were preparing extras for a film). The space was built-out with a close replica of the Fontainebleau Hotel beach, cabanas, pool, gardens, and a partial ground-floor build-out of the hotel. Four full-service kitchens were connected to the Hotel facilities locations via a conveyor belt system, as well as observation systems to capture order information from the wait staff. Supplies and materials were prepared for a potential experiment duration of 2 months. Experiment observers and hospitality staff were given a modified form of Astral Diving training in the event of any slippage of the field effect or any unforeseen field distortions or warping (see report AI-0000 “Winslow AZ McDonalds PlayPlace: Distortion Fatality Report” and “Moose Lake Recording Studios: Short Scale Rippling Effects” Section 5a ’Permanent Effects“). The Item was anchored on an additionally fail-safe extraction column shaft, with an downward excursion of 1km and”soft recovery" personnel shields with fully remote mechanical control and actuation.

Although it is well established that the overall shape, fit, and fabric of apparel rather than color drives field enhancement effects, and thus the standard-issue beach week apparel has thus been a varied number of grayscale colors, the large number of participants of this experiment made period-appropriate full-color apparel fall within budget limits. When the participants arrived and received their outfits there was a strong surge of excitement not seen at previous and since experiments. This is speculated to have contributed to the intensity of field effects as the experiment progressed, but no firm assessment has been completed to this date due to the immaturity of the Bureau’s crowd emotion inference equipment at the time. Recent studies suggest the mood of the room clearly reached well within range of psycho/emotional resonance and reinforcement thresholds in that portion of the Oldest House.

In 1990, several members of the 1987 experiment observation team were dismissed under discipline for privacy and NDA violations for creating and selling a adult VHS tape cut from the Item’s field and containment observation system recordings entitled “Robert and Joan: So Near, Yet So Far, 1987 Edition”. The dismissed staff denied the existence of tapes from previous years but a flyer was discovered last year in a desk in recently unshifted area of Luck and Probability that advertises “Joan and Robert: Their Hearts Beat In Unison” a VHS tape available from “Kathy of Accounting,” available for $75 in 1983. No record of a Kathy in Accounting has been found. It is assumed it was a (successful) ruse. An all-staff memo was immediately distributed, to reiterate the importance and binding nature of their NDA’s and Bureau Privacy Policy pertaining to all involuntary behavior and perception experienced or observed while inside the Oldest House.

Extraction from the beach is performed via the “Shepherds Crook” mechanism in the hotel lobby and beach area or the physical relocation of cabanas and other such semi-private spaces. Only once has the Item vertical failsafe removal been used. The near-instant field cessation it caused led to severe destabilizations and continuations in all participants and all required hospitalization and treatment with Astral Diving decompression therapy.

The extraction team is highly trained in personnel privacy concerns. However, the appropriate moment for extraction is hotly debated to this day. The standard extraction timing procedure presents a constant dilemma between the required participant surveillance and privacy in-field, and field shock caused by an ill-timed extraction. Thus, extraction time windows are made quite wide to reduce the chance of re-anchoring participants while in intimate situations with a close colleague, rival, or superior. The post-experiment memories and details always remain foggy but the knowledge that _something_ occurred has destabilized entire branches of the Bureau and contributes to the already high staff turnover rates.

Due to these and other experiment risks, HR and Staff Counseling are busy before and after Beach Week. They provide extensive briefings to experiment staff on all observed lingering Beach Week effects from the previous year. Also, both departments have a special internal code for cataloging the notes, gifts, letters, and stolen glances of what seem decontextualized expressions of long-lost lovers sent between people who have never spoken before but feel some sort of deja-vu while passing in the hallway or in the cafeteria.

A popular phrase among personnel is “What happens at Beach Week stays at Beach Week! (doesn’t it?).” There have been scattered reports of memory re-formation and titration among participants but federal budget limitations have limited full follow-on investigations.

####  **BACKGROUND**

The item was recovered from an offsite storage facility near the airport in Miami, Florida. Four Fontainebleau Hotel staff were found dead from dehydration. The air temperature in the room was 97°F when agents arrived. Temperatures may have even peaked at 102°F even though it was 4:21am and the storage facility was climate controlled. Field officers concluded the staff had taken a beer break but became sleepy due to the late hour and the muggy air. The enclosed space quickly overheated due to shifting climate effects caused by the Item.

The bodies of the staff were recovered along with the Item. It was soon observed that the Item could only be moved when the staff uniforms are present. Shortly after the Item was transferred to the Oldest House, an Autopsy team member sought to verify findings with the Item observation team, but could not find the Item in the proper observation room. Instead they found the Item and the field recovery team at the intake facility, the intake team lying out on the floor as if relaxing poolside and but also nearly starving. They had subsisted on emergency evacuation ration packs found in nearby shelter that was just inside the radius of effect. Many rations packs within the shelter, but outside the radius were untouched. Personnel were observed rifling through empty ration packages while exclaiming, “Those hors d’oeuvres were delightful, we don’t have anything like this in Jersey. Where’s the waiter?”

Additional recovery officers were called and sent in one at a time to move the Item or recover staff. However upon entering the region of influence each one immediately abandoned their orders . They did hear and respond to shouted orders but ignored them as orders, appearing to have understood them as shouts from other partygoers. It is still not clear if the linguistic meaning shift is perceptual or a direct shift of the acoustic waves.

Later that week one staff member was transporting a staff uniform back to the recovery site for tests and passed through intake as that was were the team was located, still attempting to relocate the Item. Dr Stevens had at the time encouraged “creative positive thinking” about Altered Items and so an influence test was performed.

A team member was attached to a corded recovery system and held the uniform box as they crossed the radius of effect. They remained anchored to their team’s shared reality for 48.4 seconds and were then recovered. A second attempt was performed wherein the uniform belt was worn. Subject remained anchored for 4 minutes.

The remaining uniforms were brought to intake and staff of the appropriate body sizes were found to wear the uniforms. Relocation of the Item was slow but successful. The path between Intake and the Item’s primary observation room necessitated extensive barricades to keep staff affected by the passing “Florida Field” from being dragged along with the Item. The Recovery Team did not exhibit any lasting effects from the Altered Item. The Item was relocated to an unused storage hanger that permits a no-mans land of 5 meters on all sides. This is the facility now commonly known as “The Beach.”

After the initial near-disaster at intake, all Island Week festivities have utilized a fail-safe combination of remote extraction measures and food delivery systems (with timeouts) to prevent death due to “the hotel running out of food and drinks.”

**Author's Note:**

> it would be a wild thing to work at the Bureau. there'd be so much creepy baked-in voyeurism? of a sort in the whole organization because of all the people losing control of themselves, persona shifts, memory alteration and replacement, weird "therapies" and experiments. All the usual terrible things that happen in some bureaucratic office but with none of the usual rules of reality. all this burrows into my brain and gets to my fears about mass surveillance, never knowing who knows what, etc. The beach week experiment observers would be the audience in a way to an ongoing, ever-repeating drama. I imagine them having a character board and charts of relationships and then there'd be the weather people and the perception people too and they'd all be bothered by each other's indifference to their own things. And then it'd be really really weird for observation staff to interact with any participants. And also, it irks me that so many staff were excited about participating despite knowing the surveillance inherent in the experiment. I guess we all do the same in a way for modern conveniences, and also we're a bit powerless against it all too. 
> 
> All this is to say that a big part of the horror of Control for me is the loss of control portrayed in so many ways (surveillance, possession, memory shit, altered states).


End file.
